mediarats
Posts: 314
Joined: 28/2/2009 From: some wainscotting
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On the 5 Live movie podcast, Nigel Floyd said this film was 'bad taste', and I can see his point. This is perhaps Jackson's most tasteless film, and from a director who gave us Bad Taste, that's some achievement. He has taken a dark book about child rape, murder, dismemberment, bereavement and grief, and turned it into a sanitised, PG rated, $100m special effects extravaganza. The word 'misjudged' does not even come close. There is no sense of the devastating trauma that has befallen Susie Salmon. Instead, she finds herself in a wondrous, hyper-saturated CGI afterlife where songbirds flock around her head, and mountains glide around in the background for no adequately explained reason. Her grisly murder has clearly sent her to a much better place. Jackson has thrown a sizeable chunk of WETA Digital behind this film, but all it achieves is to distract from the gravity, tragedy, and human drama that this film might conceivably have given us. Saoirse Ronan is well cast, with a suitably other-worldly look about her. Stanley Tucci gives us a method exercise in understated creepiness. However, as Susie's parents, Weisz and Wahlberg struggle to make much of their roles, and the less said about Susan Sarandon's comic relief grandmother, the better. In her closing narration, Susie speaks of the eponymous 'lovely bones' being the burgeoning network of new relationships that have sprung up in her absence, and because of her absence, but Jackson seems to have been oblivious to this. The majority of these relationships appear to have been discarded from the script in order to impose a traditional thriller ending. Take away the special effects, and this is little more than a TV movie of the week. Evidently Lynne Ramsay was originally going to film this, for Film4, on a fraction of the budget. I suspect she'd have done a far better job.
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